21 November 2011

Characters: Belle, a beagle dauschund mix who is no longer with us.
Pepper, a wonderful mutt of a dog who is very much with us.
Collins, a not-quite-2-and-a-half year old.
Mama, a 27-and-a-half-year old mother of three children and all sorts of animals.
Sadie Macon, a 2-and-a-half-year-old dear friend of Collins's.

Collins, singing: Belle, Belle, Belle - where are you. Where are you Belle? Pepper - where is Belle?

15 November 2011

When I was little, I had a friend. Actually, she's still a very dear friend, but that's irrelevant for this story.

Every year, on Christmas Eve, Rachel and her sister got new Christmas Pajamas. At least, I think it was every year. Childhood memories are often unreliable.

Anyway, I thought this was super cool. When Ada Bee was a baby, I gave her the first set of Christmas Pajamas on Christmas Eve. And then I did it the next year. And I loved it.

One year, I gave the kids especially cute Pajamas and I got very sad that they would only be seasonally appropriate for a couple of weeks. And of course with a maximum of 2 wearings before too dirty to wear or else the Department of Human Services would come get me, it meant that they only got 5-8 wearings out of them before they (should....) would be folded and put away.

I love Thanksgiving. I'm a food girl [I hear a collective "No scheisse, sweetheart"]. And at Christmas,
while there may be great food, it's not the focus. The focus is you
know, a savior's advent, and lots of wrapping paper. But on Turkey Day,
well, it's all about the food.

For a hot second, we thought we might be out of town for Thanksgiving, and I wouldn't get to perform the sixth consecutive hosting of the Feast this year. But, no worries. All taken care of; yay!

[Proper use of semi colon? Yay is an interjection, right? What does one do with an interjection at the end of a sentence? When we're diagramming at school, we call this one sentence, "Wow! Look at all those frogs!" However, we punctuate it like it's two, obviously. I have either entirely turned off or entirely turned on, to being a grammar nerd that is, every single one of my English grammar students this year. You can see why.]

So, menu is decided upon. No turning back now. Still finalizing some specific recipes, but the food-dish-name-cards can be written up without fear.

08 November 2011

Paul, Bee, Eas and I just returned from a very important trip. A very dear friend, and Ada Brooks's godmother, married. Additionally, we were able to visit other dear people - Eason's godfather and newly inaugurated co-godmother. These were important occasions, and a wonderful time.

Sometimes, the calendargods become angry at you. Sometimes your dad's birthday dinner is the same night as a much needed girls' night. Sometimes you have a dear friend's baby's baptism the same weekend as free 50 yard line Hotty Toddy tickets. Sometimes you and a favorite person schedule your kids birthday parties same day, 30 minutes apart, invitations already printed.

When I discovered her existence,
I was nineteen and right in the middle of a really great Ole Miss football
season. Eli was playing.

We beat Florida.

In Gainsville.

I had declared my philosophy major
and College was what College should be. Lots of brain stretching and lots of fun.

I was not married.

It was not a good time for me to
have a baby.

C'est la vie.

I was given a choice - a choice afforded
me by our government - to not have the baby. To opt out of my
womb being used as very low rent property. My uterus is my own,
and therefore I didn't have to do anything with it that I didn't want
to do.

I exercised my choice. And
I had the little bugger. I threw up in the student section during
the South Carolina game. I wasn't the only one, but the other
fans' nausea was triggered by something slightly different.

This person is now beating me at
arguments on occasion, reading a lot of great books, singing off key
like there is no tomorrow, and crafting her daddy into the insane asylum. She is a true person - her own, and her personage has little to do with me.

This is a sensitive issue, and there are many people
who I love, genuinely respect, and frankly just enjoy a lot, who are
on a different side of the issue. I have dear friends who are
actively pro-abortion, and scores of friends who are personally pro-life,
but who believe, as I did for a while, that it is a personal decision best left
up to women and their doctors.

Because of that, I've not found myself
a public [facebook] activist on the matter.

But, occasionally, life takes a turn;
all of a sudden, something that is normally not discussed around
the dinner party table is now in the mouths and status updates of the
masses. And, frankly, I want to keep my mouth shut, and not cause
conflict.

But, at this point, I think it might be closer to cowardice
rather than peacemaking.

Many people have written about Proposition
26 over the last couple of weeks. There are proponents and opponents.
There is mass confusion.

Despite identifying as a proud feminist, despite having very much
experienced a moment of true choice, despite politically
identifying half with Ron Paul and half with the pretty far left, I'll load up all of the little buggers and go vote Yes on Proposition 26 today.

Are we Consequentialists?

Many who say they agree with the principle of the Proposition are arguing against it from a consequentialist viewpoint. I believe it's wrong to make moral
decisions based on their consequences. Something is either right
or wrong, and then we deal with the consequences.

We are bound
by natural law, no matter how annoying it is. That means that
we don't first ask "What will the consequences of Proposition 26
be?" We first ask, "Is it right?"

And make
no mistake, Prop. 26 is positing a moral position. You know, like freedom of speech
and the right to due process.

Now, if you don't believe a fertilized
egg is a person, guess what? You should vote no.

If you
do, however, believe it is a person, you should vote yes.

We don't yet know what the implications
are of the proposed amendment. We don't know what lawmakers will
now choose to say, within this slightly altered constitutional framework, about in vitro fertilization or about certain forms of birth control.
But the fact is, if you decide to vote no based on that, you are using
a consequentialist view. It is either true or not. There
is no room for "true, but we don't like the implications."

Southerners who fought to hold on
to slavery in the mid 1800s viewed the matter not as a question of morality
[as would have been right], but a question of consequences.

Should you traffic human persons?

"It's irrelevant, because we cannot afford economically to not traffic them. And ps, they aren't persons, really."

Why? Because they knew if they
allowed for their black slaves to be called persons then they'd have
rights - rights that would make life less pleasant and harder for the
slave owners.

So, we mustn't answer the question,
"Do we like a world in which we affirm that an embryo is a person?"

We must instead answer the question
"Is an embryo a person?"

The "I don't know if its a person" Position

This brings me to my second point.
I think there are two reasonable answers to the question. "Yes"
or "We don't know"

Many answer the question yes, either based on spiritual teaching or on the fact that biological life has begun.

You can also answer with "I
don't know."

I think that's legitimate. At what point
does that thing which makes someone a person begin?

We tend to think that our children
are ours. But they're not. While they are our responsibility
for a time, they belong, in a very real sense either to themselves (for
the secular humanist) or to their Creator.

I don't belong to my parents; Ada
Bee doesn't belong to me. I've no right to hurt her, and, again,
I'd be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks that I do have that right.
I have no right to hurt her because she's not simply an extension of
myself; she's an entity.

A thing deserving certain things.
She has rights. The rights of what? She has the rights
of a person. When did those rights attach?

I don't think anyone looks at a brand
new baby and says "Yes, it's biologically alive, but not yet a
person." That little bundle of spit up and confusion is a
person - and we, as a society, legislate morality surrounding those
people all the time.

One cannot smother a newborn, right? Or leave it out in the cold?

A primary function of government
is to protect those who cannot protect themselves. And little
bitty baby people are the most helpless. There is a reason pedophiles
have a hard time in prison. Even felons, whose moral compasses
are oft skewed, know that hurting a child is a special kind of wrong.

So, it attaches sometime between
conception and birth. An unfertilized egg is not a person.
A screaming infant is very much a person, deserving all the lawful,
moral protection that brings.

What should we do with an 'I don't
know'? Well, what do we currently do? We deal with
this all the time. Society has situations day in and day out where
we protect potential persons.

Firemen run into burning buildings,
putting their own lives at risk, to see if there is life there.
Why? Because we don't know if anyone is in there, but if there
is someone there, he or she needs to be saved. So, we act as if
there is a person present, even though we don't know for sure.

Cities bulldoze condemned buildings.
What do they do first? They check to make sure there aren't any
people in there. We act as if there is a person there, even though
we don't know for sure.

What would you do with an I don't
know? Would you tell them to bulldoze the building away, just
cross your fingers that it's not actually a person in there?

These are not merely "women's
reproductive issues"; if they were merely that, I'd be first in
line to preach None of the Government's Business. Don't tell me how to to take
care of my body.

Instead, these are issues surrounding an entity
that you cannot say with surety is not a person. A person
created Imago Dei, I might add, a person who will one day legitimately
beat his or her mother at checkers.

If you cannot answer no, you must
answer yes.

Why? Because we've a duty to
protect the potential people in the condemned building. We have
a moral duty to protect the helpless. If there is potentially
a person in a uterus, it is not less deserving of protection just because
it is young or because it is in a different person's body.

This is the rub, right? "But it's my body!" Do you remember that old glorious example from ethics conversations?

You have a right to swing your fist through the air, but that right ends when someone else's face begins?

Well, you've a right to do with your uterus (and spleen and sinuses) everything you want to do with it (from the government's perspective). That right becomes limited when it affects the rights of another person.

[Although, it's worth noting, that when we tell people they cannot use heroine, we are telling them what they can and cannot do with their bodies. Oh? Because they might run their car off the road or leave their children motherless? Yes, I see. They might affect the rights of another person.]

Was Ada Bee a person while the youngest
Manning was throwing for some ridiculous number of yards against the
Gators?

If you cannot say no, you must act
as if she was. And, if you cannot say Ada Brooks wasn't a person,
you cannot say that any embryo is not a person.

If you can say embryos aren't people,
vote no.

I cannot say they aren't, I cannot affirm the negative, so, to protect the helpless, who are potentially persons, I'll be voting yes on Proposition 26.